Exploring the factors related to endorsing gambling as an escape

Research suggests there is a strong relationship between gambling severity and endorsing gambling as an escape. The present study investigated what factors were related to endorsing gambling as an escape. In Experiment 1, 149 university students completed a questionnaire designed to measure the contingencies maintaining one's gambling and a measure of executive function. Endorsing gambling as an escape was predicted by executive function associated with affect (empathy). In Experiment 2, 269 university students completed a questionnaire of the contingencies maintaining one's gambling and two measures related to affect (current affective state and pattern of emotion regulation). Impulse control related to dealing with negative emotions was unique in predicting gambling as an escape. The results suggest that endorsing gambling as an escape is related to emotion regulation both at a neurological and cognitive level, which is potentially informative for those interested in identifying, preventing and treating problem gambling.     

The Veils of Clio: Dimensions of a Behavioral Narratology

This paper outlines a behavior-analysis approach to the field of narratology, the study of the narrative or story, with emphasis on nonfiction stories and the processes by which such stories distort the world they describe. Stories are described in terms of (a) a behavior-analysis adaptation of Todorov''s (1977) analysis of the plots of stories in terms of states of equilibrium/disequilibrium and (b) Grant''s (2005) analysis of the structure of stories in terms of establishing operations and escape contingencies. These two sets of concepts are applied to understanding how and why stories lead to distortions of the events they report.     

Letters From Pamela: Reading Howard S. Becker's Writing(s) for Social Scientists

A deconstructive reading of a text is only in part an argument that can be abstracted. More than that, a reading deconstructs a text to make explicit how that text implicates a certain kind of reader. The reading can celebrate, resist, or essentialize the very construction of the reader by that text My reading of Becker's Writing for Social Scientists is a resisting reading which focuses: 1) on the formal aspects of the writing style that Becker endorses for social scientists, and 2) on the figure of the woman which Becker uses as a vehicle of “the structure of feeling” that promotes the message of his text.     

How to Do Things With Texts: A Functional Account of Reading Comprehension

We offer an account of reading comprehension that we believe will help clarify some common conceptual confusions in the relevant literature, as well as contribute to existing functional accounts. We argue that defining texts qua texts as stimulus classes, on the one hand, and equating “comprehension” with behavior (covert or otherwise), on the other, are not useful conceptual moves, especially when behavioral settings go beyond basic literacy skills acquisition. We then analyze the structure of the contingencies that usually evoke talk of “comprehension” using techniques from analytic philosophy. We show how keeping the results of this analysis in mind can help avoid the conceptual bafflement that often arises, even among behavior analysts, when defining or assessing behavioral phenomena related to reading comprehension. Using two contrasting cases (legal texts and stories), we argue that what counts as comprehension depends, not peripherally but crucially, on the shared social practices of which texts are a part. Finally, we propose a new framework for classifying reader–text contingencies by combining two dimensions: openness of setting and embeddedness of reinforcement.     

Methods Used with a Low Grade Intelligence Group

Abstract

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading them, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through the mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.     

Who killed change management?

A story is told here of an investigation into change management's apparent death, provoked by the dubious business novel Who Killed Change [Blanchard, K., J. Britt, P. Zigarmi, and J. Hoekstra. 2009. Who Killed Change? Solving the Mystery of Leading People Through Change. London: Harper Collins Publishers]. The story is told over eight chapters inviting you to investigate competing explanations for the death of change management using the structure of the story arc: stasis, trigger, quest, surprise, critical choice, climax, reversal and resolution. An annoying voice (sometimes interior monologue and at other times dialogue) of another reader keen to inform and frame your understanding of the status of change management remains ever present. The case is solved with the story's resolution providing insights into advantages of investigating over literature reviewing, the problematic/masculine nature of murder metaphors, the academic potential of story arcs and the mystery which characterises organizational change.     

First Episode Psychosis: A Magical Realist Guide Through Liminal Terrain

This paper presents a narrative of a client, ‘Eva’, who experienced what is termed by psychiatry a first episode psychosis. As a family and relationship counsellor practicing narrative therapy with its backdrop of post‐structuralism and curiosity of exploring new entry points for narratives of identity, I tentatively sought new ways to engage with Eva's story. My endeavour in meeting with ‘First Episode Psychosis’ is described through adopting a listening position from a reading of magical realist literature. This extends Michael White's political exploration of ethnographer Arnold van Gennep's liminal spaces (in the rites of passage metaphor) to understand units of experience, units of meaning, and the fluidity of identity in psychosis, which is contextualised as a response to events in the client's story.     

When do stories change our minds? Narrative persuasion about social problems

Scholars in a number of disciplines have sought to assess the power of reading or viewing a personal story to modify people's beliefs. However, the research, which has been pursued under diverse programs, has produced conflicting findings. We focus on the persuasiveness of personal stories about problems that are structural (rather than individual) and whose solution requires government action. Overall, the research suggests that although personal stories can overcome people's tendency to resist new information, they often do not do so. People's preexisting beliefs, assumptions, and stereotypes affect their willingness to be absorbed by a story, to empathize with the stories' protagonists, and to endorse the message communicated by the story. We argue also for a sociological perspective on narrative persuasion, one which, unlike the mostly experimental research conducted so far, pays attention to the context in which people encounter stories and to the norms shaping people's assessment of a story as credible, relevant, and important.     

Things are not what they seem: Modisane’s recently discovered short story

The unusual form and style of Modisane’s hitherto unpublished short story ‘All Sons of Gaika’ presents the reader with various challenges. It differs in tone and style from his previously published work, and its rather contrived dialogue and somewhat obscure plot are puzzling. Is this some kind of satire, and, if so, what is the target? Thematically, the story seems (at face value) to be another examination of the tensions between tradtion and modernity, and focuses in particular on the issue of lobola (‘bride‐price’). The young couple at the centre of the story are at pains to distance themselves from traditional pieties. To complicate matters, a secret resistance movement is seeking recruits in the area, and our protagonist, Jason, is somehow implicated. Two security policemen are the pantomime villains of the piece, as they seek to either coopt or frame Jason. The hybrid figure of a diviner conducts a cleansing ceremony, and this is the occasion for an excursion into postcolonial metacommentary, drawing on the Prospero‐Caliban topos. The story concludes with a wedding, and comes to an enigmatic conclusion. Is this is a sustained exercise in irony or mockery? How much (or how little) does it revel of the author, writing from exile in London?     

Sociological literature in an age of computerized texts

Although scholars have quickly adopted computers for word processing, new forms of interactive electronic texts pose important questions for the nature of scholarly literature in the social sciences. The social relationships constructed by interactive electronic texts devalue the authority of the writer and empower the reader. This is due in part to the phenomenology of electronic texts; in part to the social contexts governing the use of textual artifacts; and in part to the origin of electronic texts in the reading culture of computer technologists. Although narrative reading cultures empower the writer (as “author”) over readers, technical reading strategies construct the text as information which is given form by the reader. New information technologies thus challenge the scholarly concept of authorship, the status of scholarly writing as a “literature,” and the notion of copyright of texts.     

“It Was Like This,I Think”: Constructing an Adoption Narrative for Chinese Adopted Children

Using qualitative survey data from 35 adoptive parents of children from China, I explore the type of narrative parents construct about their child's “abandonment.” Parents tell the story they know best—the child's adoption story—being careful to not overly burden the child with harsh abandonment realities. Most parents opt to tell a dominant narrative, portraying the child's Chinese birth parents as parents who loved their child and struggled with the decision to give up their child pressured by outside forces to do so. Any counternarrative told seems to be for the adoptive parents themselves, not for their children.     

From Story to Science: The Contribution of Reading Fiction and Hybrid Stories to Conceptual Change with Young Children

This quasi‐experimental study with 34 preschoolers explores how fictional and hybrid storybooks contribute to conceptual changes in preschoolers' understanding of lunar concepts. Interviews and children's drawings before and after reading sessions provided the data. Findings revealed that (i) young children have intuitive knowledge and alternative explanations from their experiences and lay culture, (ii) storybook messages and illustrations cause misconceptions and (iii) hybrid stories increase protoscientific explanations among children of both genders. Combining accurate scientific information and enjoyable context makes hybrid storybooks effective edutainment for preschoolers.     

A Blumerian Approach to Storytelling

Blumer's work on life histories and symbolic interactionism represents an important contribution in the twenty-first century. I join his work with research on storytelling to build a Blumerian approach to storytelling. This approach holds that social actors use stories to construct subjective meanings, stories exist in some social context, stories are told or written for some audience, a wide range of social processes produce stories, the temporal sequence of storytelling audiences is important, social actors use interactional techniques of showing story preferences, and symbolic structures and narrative linkages are the resources social actors use to compose stories. Future research can continue to develop this approach.     

Living Values: Maternal Corporal Subjectivity and the Value of Life and Death

The article offers a reading of the Jewish myth of Samson as presenting a set of relations among masculinity, collectivity, and death. Concentrating on the role of women in Samson's life I attempt to decipher some ways in which these relations develop and to explore the role that women and mothers may play in challenging them. Building on Luce Irigaray, what I highlight in my reading of Samson's story is the process whereby attachment to life appears as a possible guiding principle but is at the same time negated and cancelled. I present attachment to life not only as a form of desire but also as a specific kind of ethicality inherent in life itself.     

Westerns,Weddings and Web‐Weavers: Reading Gender as Genre in Organizational Theory

This article focuses on the process of reading and its role in the construction of knowledge. Reading is an activity which is personal yet never singular: we bring to our reading of one text a range of knowledges, experiences and strategies derived from other texts. This ‘intertextuality’ means that ‘meaning‐making’ is a complex negotiation process between reader and text, whereby linkages are made between divergent genres. This is explored through the author's own personal experiences of reading gender/organizational theory. These readings demonstrate the way in which ‘narratives’ of other genres, such as film and fiction, spill over, infect and manipulate the construction of narratives within organizational texts. Further, the ready intertextual connections which are made help to expose some of the embedded assumptions about gender. Whilst these are, in the main, quite traditional, the consideration of the processes involved in reading helps to challenge these as ‘truths’ as well as signpost possibilities for new forms of writing gender/organizational theory.     

I DANCE TO YOU: REFLECTIONS ON IRIGARAY'S I LOVE TO YOU IN PILATES AND VIRTUOSITY

This essay engages Luce Irigaray's view of love as carnal and relational labor, and her ethics of that love, as they emerge in her book I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. Of particular interest is the 'to' in her formulation 'I love to you'. This 'to', the author argues, is deployed by, or reverberates between, dancing, observing and writing bodies. It is a technology of corporeal intimacy, a protocol for reading and re-imagining the love story of dance criticism. Two sites offer illustrations of opposing views of Irigaray's 'to'. The first, the Pilates studio, links 'to' to the metaphoric, sometimes proprietary intimacy of working with a practitioner body to body. The second, a decidedly 'anti-Irigaraian' love story, explores virtuosity as a romance between dancer and critic, one in which the latter is seduced by, and envelopes the former as 'you who will never be, yet must be mine'.     

Parenting and the Harry Potter stories: a social care perspective

This paper analyses the capacities of the parents in the Harry Potter stories, written by J. K. Rowling, from a social care perspective. It argues that there is a synergy between what the social sciences have discovered about ‘good enough parenting’ and the insights that can be gathered from entering the imaginative world of literature. This is illustrated by a discussion of the qualities of the parents and parent substitutes in the four books published between 1997 and 2000. It concludes that fictional experiences of childhood create empathy in the reader and enable us to confront the need for imagination as parents and practitioners, while the social sciences keep knowledge grounded and evidenced. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reimagining Yentl While Revisiting Feminism in the Light of Relational Approaches to Gender and Sex

This article is an imaginative endeavor based upon the short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” written by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982). In taking creative license and entering Yentl's world, a new voice and narrative emerges for her and the major characters in the story. Using psychoanalytic relational theories on multiple self-states and postmodern gender and sexuality perspectives, this article undertakes fleshing out the characters and the motives of Bashevis Singer in writing the story. From each character's point of view we learn more of Yentl's subjectivity, her multiply oriented desires from multiple self-states, and expand Singer's story from its original linear course. In Singer's work, Yentl is a two dimensional girl possessing the “soul of a man,” which would mean in the 19th-century Poland Jewish shtetl world that she longs to study Torah/Talmud in a yeshiva. From this paradoxical premise the story eventually ends with Yentl surrendering all claim to the male world of study and then vanishing from the story altogether. This article plays off of this original premise—a male soul within the body of a female—but, instead of seeing this as a binary kind of conflict that must be resolved, that one must be masculine or feminine, girl or boy, heterosexual or homosexual, now will allow for the multiplicity of selves, wishes, and desires of Yentl, a postmodern woman living in a premodernity world.

“Truth itself is often concealed in such a way that the harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.” (Singer, 1982 ——— . ( 1982 ). The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer . New York , NY : Farrar, Straus and Giroux . [Google Scholar], p. 169)     

The Metaphor Goddess in Three Quarter Time: A Relational Use of Story And Metaphor

This paper explores co-creating, and integrating metaphor and story within the relational space of patient and analyst where new meanings can be co-authored into a more adaptive autobiography—a tale based on the impressions of life. Through this joint construction of intersecting stories, a person has an opportunity to rewrite a story which allows an individual to function more productively and creatively— a goal of psychotherapy.     

Some contingencies of spelling

This paper presents some speculation about the contingencies that might select standard spellings. The speculation is based on a new development in the teaching of spelling—the process writing approach, which lets standard spellings emerge collateral to a high frequency of reading and writing. The paper discusses this approach, contrasts it with behavior-analytic research on spelling, and suggests some new directions for this latter research based on a behavioral interpretation of the process writing approach to spelling.